The chapter examines how and why ordinary people petitioned gods and other non-visible entities, such as spirits, ‘immortals’ (仙 xian), protective saints, or ancestors, for favours of all kinds. In return for offerings of food and drink and the burning of ritual items, such as incense, oil, paper images, paper money, charms, or printed prayers, they asked for help, cures for illness, the birth of a son, protection against evil forces, or success in business or examinations.

The class of Seifert manifolds is in many respects well understood, and has a natural parametrization in terms of Seifert data, and so we might expect criteria for embedding in terms of such data. We first review the notion of Seifert manifold and Seifert invariants. In this chapter we shall consider orientable Seifert manifolds which are Seifert fibred over orientable base orbifolds.

China had a long tradition of religiously inspired rebellion, and this chapter explores the ways in which folk religion fed into different forms of resistance in the Mao era. Popular protest in the Mao era was greater than has been assumed, but it was socio-economic and small-scale in characters, which did not prevent participants from believing that their protests had the blessing of the gods. It begins by looking at very low-level forms of resistance such as jokes as a way of lampooning authority; it goes on to explore the efforts of spirit mediums and others to stand up to authority in defence of folk religion, especially following the famine (1959–61) when people blamed disaster on the fact that they had denied the change to make sacrifices to the gods. Planned, organized rebellion was rare and was closely tied to the remnants of the redemptive religious societies. The chapter ends by looking at attempts by ordinary people to make themselves emperors and at millenarian risings, notably the Catholic rebellion in the Taiyuan region in 1965.

This chapter explores Bieral’s ascent in Boston’s sporting world, particularly in boxing and gambling. As a pugilist and promoter, he gained notoriety and respect among working-class men, leveraging his physical prowess and entrepreneurial acumen. The narrative situates prizefighting within a broader culture of honor and individualism, where violence served as both entertainment and social currency. Bieral’s transition from fighter to promoter and casino operator marks his evolution into a figure of influence. The chapter underscores the role of sport in legitimizing urban masculinity and the economic structures that sustained vice industries, revealing how athletic fame often overlapped with criminality.

This chapter provides an overview of major theoretical approaches to morphosyntax in second language acquisition. The chapter starts with an overview of major data collection measures that are used to study morphosyntactic phenomena, including production data, judgment data, and online tasks, self-paced reading in particular. The applications and limitations of the different data collection measures are addressed. The chapter subsequently considers the debate between representational deficit approaches vs. missing surface inflection approaches to difficulties with inflectional morphology in the second language, examining these approaches in the domain of verbal inflection. The chapter then moves on to approaches that consider feature reassembly and morphological (in)congruency and discusses studies in these two frameworks in the domain of number marking on nominals. The chapter concludes with a summary and suggestions for future research.

From the Socialist Education Movement onwards, folk religion specialists – now classed as ‘superstition professionals’ (akin to ‘religious professionals’) -- were targeted for re-education. Spirit mediums were singled out because of their number and their central role in healing. This was the prelude to the Four Olds Campaign inaugurated by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when religious sites were destroyed and religious specialists came under attack from Red Guards, despite the fact that ‘religion’ was never named as one of the ‘four olds’. Two features of Cultural Revolution politics are explored: the use of iconoclasm – especially in relation to the Confucius Temple in Qufu; and the attempt to ‘revolutionize the environment’, which entailed renaming streets, shops, and consumer items, and painting buildings red. It ends with the fitful Campaign to Criticize Confucius and Lin Biao (1973–6), which engaged the rural and urban populace in a polemical critique of some simple Confucian texts.

The poverty of the stimulus in the domain of language refers to the gap between the knowledge of grammar attained and the knowledge that could be deduced on the basis of the available linguistic input. Within the Generative Enterprise, the notion of the poverty of the stimulus plays a critical role in the motivation for positing Universal Grammar, a set of innate cognitive principles restricting the range of possible human grammars. This chapter first considers the poverty of the stimulus in the acquisition of native language and then turns to the poverty of the stimulus in the acquisition of nonnative language; both sections review a number of empirical studies documenting language acquisition under conditions of a poverty of the stimulus. For nonnative language, examples are drawn from research on morphosyntax, the syntax-semantics interface, and phonology. These studies reveal that nonnative learners (can) come to acquire subtle linguistic properties which could not be deduced (i) from their native-language grammar, (ii) from the Target Language input available to them or (iii) from classroom instruction.

Complex fluids can be found all around us, from molten plastics to mayonnaise, and understanding their highly nonlinear dynamics is the subject of much research.

This text introduces a common theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the flow behavior of complex fluids. This framework allows for results including a qualitative understanding of the relationship between a fluid’s behavior at the microscale of particles or macromolecules, and its macroscopic, viscoelastic properties. The author uses a microstructural approach to derive constitutive theories that remain simple enough to allow computational predictions of complicated macroscale flows.

Readers develop their intuition to learn how to approach the description of materials not covered in the book, as well as limits such as higher concentrations that require computational methods for microstructural analysis.

This monograph’s unique breadth and depth make it a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in fluid mechanics.

This chapter explores the worldview of individuals who reject religion but, rather than placing their faith in science (scientism), put it in humanity, embracing the humanities and culture, and affirming that human beings are persons born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Ocean acidification is a significant but under-recognised climate impact where oceans absorb CO2, leading to a 30–40 per cent decrease in pH since pre-industrial times. This poses a threat to marine ecosystems and food webs, as calcifying organisms such as oysters and corals struggle to build their shells, while non-calcifying species face behavioural changes. Despite an increasing amount of scientific literature, OA receives minimal attention from social sciences and lacks international governance. The book explores how OA should be governed, mapping the governance landscape as a regime complex involving multiple actors and instruments. It proposes global experimentalist governance as suitable for addressing the complexity of OA, examining case studies of the OA Alliance and the International Maritime Organization. The research finds that while OA is framed as a climate change effect needing holistic responses, including mitigation, adaptation, and resilience measures, current governance remains fragmented, with limited coordination among relevant international frameworks.

Referring to the medical model of frenzy sketched out in the first two chapters, Chapter 3 explores the metaphysical problems which it caused. The model’s insistence on the total dependence of the mind on the brain, it argues, placed pressure on a Christian cosmology in which ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ were supposed to be fully separable. Frenzy forced contemporaries to ask how it was possible for the human mind – made in the ‘image of God’ – to be impaired by organic disease. For most early modern Christians, the mind was a part of the soul, and this soul was immaterial, incorruptible, and immortal. Frenzy gave the impression that it invaded every part of the person, but this impression was false. The soul had to be immune to brain disease. This chapter examines the ancient roots of this problem, and examines how early modern England’s preachers, physicians, and philosophers attempted to solve it.

The case of bilingualism is a challenge for psycholinguists who aim to understand how the two (or more) languages of a bilingual are represented in the brain, whether they are organized similarly and how bilinguals manage to keep their languages apart. We first review studies that investigate the organization of the two languages in the brain and whether they interfere with each other during access to the lexicon and syntactic representations. In the second part of the chapter, we report neurolinguistic studies that examine cognitive processes and neural perspectives in monolinguals and bilinguals, with a special focus on factors that may influence bilingual language processing such as proficiency and age of acquisition. Finally, in the third part of the chapter we present theories on L2 processing and discuss the studies presented earlier in relation to these theories. In addition, we have extended the sections on lexical access in sentence context and syntactic processing by including recent studies that reflect the flourishing interest for bilinguals’ ability to predict upcoming words online during sentence comprehension.